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Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Birds and Beatles

by
Rick Bailey

I’m reading a New Yorker article about Paul McCartney at the breakfast table one morning.
At the top of the page there’s a black and white photo of him and John Lennon,
circa 1965. It’s the year, the caption tells us, of Help! and Rubber Soul.

My wife and I are leaving for Italy in a
week. I’ve been downloading stuff to my Kindle to read while we’re away. I’ve
got enough to last me quite a while, some novels (a few trashy ones, a few edifying
ones), Clive James’ Poetry Notebook,
a bunch of articles from the New Yorker,
the New York Review of Books, and the
New Republic. (I guess I’m keeping it
New this spring.) When language fatigue sets in over there, and I know it will,
with the constant strain of trying to listen very fast to decode flights of Italian,
it’s a pleasure to lie down in silence and read in my own language.

“Photo by David Bailey,” I say to my wife. Our
son’s name. “How about that?”

“What?”

“This article about Paul McCartney. It has
a photo by David Bailey.”

Hmmm.

I give her a minute, then ask, “Who’s your
favorite Beatle?”

“Don’t start.”

She’s reading a book called Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits
and Spies in the Sixteenth Century Mediterranean World. The bibliography is
forty pages. Good lord.

“Are you taking that thing on the plane?”

“Maybe.” She pushes a small taste of eggs onto
her espresso spoon.

“It’s a brick.”

“Jesuits,” she says. “I love the Jesuits.”

I hum a few bars of “When I’m Sixty-Four.”
Two pals and I turn sixty-four within a few months of each other this year.
I’ve suggested, more than a few times, that we should have a “when I’m
sixty-four party” sometime this summer, to celebrate ourselves.

Later this day I will drive ninety minutes
north to visit my old friend Brian. His caretaker Sheila has told me he’s not
quite himself. Listening to music in the car, piped from my iPhone into the
radio, I make a mental note of oldies I’d like to play for him. “I’ve Got
Friday on My Mind,” by the Easybeats; Cyrcle’s “It’s a Turn Down Day”; The
Beatles’ “Dr. Robert,” so we can hear that scratchy guitar and lush chorus. I’d
like to see him react to the organ solo in Bonnie Raitt’s “We Used to Rule the
World.” In the car I play the music loud, today even louder than usual. I know
I probably shouldn’t. My wife and kids tell me I’m getting a little deaf. (A
little?) These days the car and treadmill are the only places I listen to music.
I can’t help myself. I want it loud.

He’ll be sitting in his wheelchair at the
kitchen table, his back to the doorway I walk through. I rehearse the scene in
the mind. “Remember this?” Sitting across from him, I’ll play part of a song. I’ll
wait to see the look of recognition, watch him travel back in time. “How about
this?” When my mother was sick and I
made this drive, I listened to podcasts, for reflection and for laughs. For these
visits, I want bang and bash. I want nostalgia.

We bought every Beatle album as soon as it
hit the store. This was, of course, back in the vinyl days. The first three or
four lps, in mono, cost less than five dollars. We took them home, put them on
the turntable, and sat down to listen. It was “close listening,” almost like the
close reading of a poem advocated by the New Critics. In the front bedroom of
Brian’s house on 3rd Street, we sat on the floor and played the records
over and over, holding the album covers, like holy objects, in our laps. There
was a photo or two to look at; on the back, a song list. You listened, and you
looked. “Meet the Beatles,” headshots of four young guys in partial shadow; twelve
songs, the longest of which was “I Saw Her Standing There” (2:50), the shortest,
incredibly short by today’s standards, “Little Child” (1:46), produced by
George Martin, for Capitol Records.

Years later, my kids went totally digital.
They bought CDs and queued up the songs they wanted to hear. On some CDs they
listened to only one or two songs; that was it. Back in the vinyl days, we
listened to the whole album, every track all the way through, even the songs we
didn’t particularly like. Ringo singing “Act Naturally.” Really? To lift the
needle, move it to the song you liked, and set it down, aiming for the barely
visible gap between tracks, was to risk scratching the record.

A scratch would last forever. That was the
thing about vinyl.

And now it’s back.

I have purist friends who could explain
why vinyl is better: the sound profiles you get in analog are richer, far superior
to the sterile precision of digital. I guess I get that. I’m still kind of an
analog guy. I look at the clock and say “a quarter to” and “a little after,” it
bothers me that soon kids will no longer be able to decode the face of a clock
and tell time, the way many of them will never learn to write in cursive. I
remember moving the needle to tune in an AM radio station in the car. I like a
speedometer needle. I go about
seventy mph (not sixty-seven) when I drive up to visit Brian.

I should ask him, What do you think about the
vinyl craze these days?

I know what he would say.

Who gives a fuck?

He’s sitting in his wheelchair with his
back to the door. The dogs bark when I walk in. There are seven of them. It
takes a minute to calm them down. Brian gives me a crooked smile and says, “How
the hell are you?” It’s his usual greeting. He has a full beard, a lot more
salt than pepper, and he’s wearing a hat. It occurs to me that in all the
recent pictures of him I’ve seen, he has that hat on. When I ask him how the
hell he’s doing, he turns his head
and points to his hair, slate gray, wisps of what’s left of it hanging down.
It’s the radiation, he says.

I figure we’ll get a few basics out of the
way, before getting down to basics.

Sleep?

He says he sleeps just fine.

Appetite?

He says he’s an eating machine.

Pain?

Not even a headache. If the doctor didn’t
tell him he was sick, he wouldn’t even know it.

I ask if he’s ever had a beard before.

Couple times.

He’s sixty-four years old, a September
birthday, a year older than me. Three months ago Sheila organized a benefit. It
went from noon to nine at the Elks Club bar in Bay City, all music all the time,
played by over forty years of musician friends in the area. Brian packed the
place.

I tell him I’m thinking about a “when I’m
sixty-four party” for me and a few pals this summer. What does he think?
Yup.

Next to the kitchen table, a tv set
displays weekday afternoon programming. He watches it while I ask more
questions, about his sister, son, nephew, a pal we call Easy Eddie. I’m
thinking about my song list when he wonders, Hey, what’re we going to eat?

In this New Yorker article, published in 2007, Paul McCartney confesses to
dyeing his hair. He also confesses to being freaked out about actually being
sixty-four. “The thought is somewhat horrifying,” he tells the interviewer.
“It’s like ‘Well, no, this can’t be me.’” The article is contemporaneous with
the release of an album called “Memory Almost Full,” which the interviewer
describes as “up-tempo rock songs … tinged with melancholy.” I know the album.
When it came out, I listened to thirty seconds of each track at the iTunes
Store, bought one song, “Dance Tonight,” for $1.29, and downloaded it. It’s a
jaunty piece with a kazoo solo in the bridge.

The writer mentions the famous deaths:
Lennon, Harrison, Linda.

McCartney, I learn, was sixteen when he
wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four.”

When Brian and I were that age, we had
begun to realize we were not going to be the next Lennon and McCartney. We had
written exactly one song together, called “If I Could Dream,” which some years later
he managed to get recorded with a band he was in, graciously crediting “Bailey
and Bennett” in parentheses beneath the song title as the composers.

I
come back from Mulligans with two bar burgers, mushrooms and mayo on his, and French
fries. The dogs bark. Four or five of them eventually settle under the table.
We eat our burgers, watch a little more tv, and I think again about my song
list. Maybe I won’t play the songs after all. Who wants to listen music on a
phone, anyway? In the kitchen it will sound like a cheap transistor radio.

I say, “Hey, remember ‘It’s a Turn Down
Day’”?

He looks at the tv for a bit, then turns
my way. “The Cyrcle,” he says. “They were a good band.”

The show we’re listening to is called The
Doctor. It’s talk. Two men, two women. One of the men is dressed like a doctor.
They’re discussing castration as a way of punishing rapists. Or maybe it’s a
preventative measure. The man dressed as a doctor explains that there is both
surgical and chemical castration. The two women agree that, either way, it’s an
extreme measure. They are both against it.

I try another one: “Remember ‘I’ve Got
Friday on My Mind’”?

It takes a minute. He turns away from the
tv and gives me a partial crooked smile and a nod. “Good song,” he says.

I know the nod.

Sheila says, “Getting tired, Brian?”

It’s for me. Well, okay, I think, that’s
enough.

We sit together for a while longer,
through the rest of my fries. Brian takes a bite or two from his burger, gazes at
the tv. Before going to commercial, the doctor previews the next segment of the
show. They’re going to talk about a woman’s cancer treatment. The woman on
screen looks familiar.

“Is that Bruce Jenner?” I say.

Sheila says it’s not Bruce Jenner. It’s a real woman.

“Goddam,” Brian says.

We watch a few more minutes in silence. I
get up to go. The dogs rouse and congregate around my feet. I tell Brian see
you in a month or so, shake his hand, and lean down for a long hug. “You hang
in there now,” I say. “I’ll be back the middle of next month.”

He nods, says thanks for coming, Richard.

“See you, right?”

He nods. I’m pretty sure he nods.

About the time I get to the freeway, which
takes ten minutes or so, my iPhone shuffles to a favorite Beatle song. I play
it loud and sing along: “You say you’ve seen certain wonders, and your bird can
sing.” That would be another song to mention, on another visit.

A few days later, my wife and I are
upstairs packing. It’s mid morning. I’m tossing power cords for my phone and
Kindle and laptop into a carry-on when I realize I’m not wearing any pants. What
happened to my pants?

“Have you seen my black sweater?” my wife
says.

When did I take off my pants? For a while
now I’ve been walking into rooms only to find I can’t remember why I’m there. I’m
used to that. Like tinnitus, it comes with age. Losing my pants is new.

I stand there, marveling at this altered
state. Then I remember: I took them off in the other room, in front of the
closet, so I could try on another pair I had fitted a while back.

“I’m losing it,” she says.

There they are, the pants I tried on, in the
carry-on. So the other ones are over there?

“Can
you hear anything I’m saying?” she says.

“I hear you fine.”

We’re all losing it.

One of these days I’ll have to get my
hearing checked. I sort of don’t want to know. I think about my parents growing
old, my father and all his hearing aids. There were owls in the woods a half a
mile away from their house. My parents almost always slept with a window open.
For years they said they heard owls all night. One day my wife and I were up
for a visit. When I asked about them, my mother said yes, the owls were still
there. Then she added, “Your dad can’t hear them any more.” I think he took it
in stride. What choice did he have? Still, it broke my heart.

One day it will happen to me. I’ll wake
up, look for my pants, and I won’t be able to hear the birds and the Beatles.
I’ll have to remember to consider myself lucky.

Rick Bailey writes about family, food, travel, current
events, what he reads and what he remembers. The University of Nebraska Press
will publish a collection of his essays, American English, Italian Chocolate in summer
2017. He and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of
San Marino.